


Swaying Motions

by Sanguith



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Depths of Mind, Existential Dread, Gen, Horror, Own Lore, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:35:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25735141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanguith/pseuds/Sanguith
Summary: Just a very short story I wrote in a few hours as a writing exercise. I try to describe a man’s internal thoughts after being stabbed and to explore some existential thoughts that follows this event (building on some of my own lore that I’ve been working on!). I’m not entirely satisfied with it but uh, hey - I had some fun writing it. Nothing explicitly gorey or anything like that, but treads into some potentially disturbing territory nonetheless so caution is advised!Genre: Horror/Cosmic Horror
Kudos: 3





	Swaying Motions

I hardly felt it at first. A sudden impact and a feeling as if the air had gone out of me. Then a sharpness somewhere around my abdomen, accompanied by an immediate cold, dizzying feeling in my head that in hindsight might have been the blood leaving for more immediate areas of need. I might have cried out in pain or in disbelief, but I don’t remember now. 

I knew I had been stabbed, of course. I had seen it all happening in real-time mere seconds ago. Could still hear the footsteps of my assailant fading from hearing as I caught a last glimpse of his running form disappearing around the building. Could see a dark spot forming on my brand-new T-shirt when I looked down and the red streaks that ran down the length of my fingers pressing down on the wound as my own blood flooded between them. Droplets falling on my white sneakers. A myriad of thoughts and impressions assaulted me along with a strange feeling of mild disgruntled annoyance. Like I had just spilled coffee on the carpet and knew I would have to clean it up or it would leave a stain.

It was… strange, as I sit here now trying to write it all down. You’d think the experience would involve a whole lot more shock and panicked frenzy yet with some appreciation of logic to it all, but no. It was almost as if I was momentarily jerked out of my own body and was looking through the eyes of someone else, someone whose emotions were simply unable to be felt by myself, reduced to the Observer.

The notion miraculously occurred to me however that the next logical step to take in this particular situation would probably be to call an ambulance, and so my unoccupied hand immediately sought my pocket. I tried bringing up the emergency dial button but my shaking fingers kept pressing the wrong places on the screen and only gave me a sad display of my own pale face staring back at me as, instead, the front camera opened. How frustratingly ironic. The strange blur of my vision wasn’t helping things, either. Suddenly the phone I had been holding was no longer in my hand for some reason and I was dimly aware of a sharp clanking sound following its disappearance. Weird, I thought. Well, I reckoned the hospital wasn’t that far away, and so I began the familiar act of lifting one leg in front of the other in an effort to walk. It’s only now, when I’ve been informed of the unfolding of the events that I know I had apparently been attempting to do so in the complete opposite direction.

Something slammed hard into both my knees then, and a moment later I felt the same thing on the side of my face. It took me a few moments of mental processing to realize the strange grey vertical blob suddenly occupying half of my field of vision was the sidewalk and that I appeared to be lying on the ground. A distant part of my brain screamed at me to get up, but I felt awfully tired all of a sudden and the mere act of closing my eyes gave me no small amount of relief. Trying to listen to the voice, I brought up my hands and arms to push on either side of me but I only managed to pathetically disturb some pebbles beside my head. Defeated, I gave up.

I was dimly aware that the strange black tunnel forming around the edges of my vision was my own consciousness slipping away. An understanding washed over me that if it did, then I would probably never wake up again. I mustered all my strength to shout for help but only a miserable sigh escaped my lips.

They say the last of our senses to go before we die is hearing. I did hear things as the blackness crept closer around me. The rhythmic sound of feet on concrete. Was it a memory of my aggressor’s flight, or someone coming to my aid? Perhaps it wasn’t running at all, and simply the sound of my own quick, weakening pulse in my ears. I heard a woman’s voice, tinged with high-pitched fear and urgency. I wished I could reach out and comfort her, whoever she was. Tell her it was alright, whatever was wrong. But my body was no longer connected to me. I felt a sudden pang of deep regret at the thought. Oh, how I wished I could have done more. Been more. Taken more opportunities, not shunned them as they appeared and escaped into my own solitary lifestyle and pretended it was enough. It had never quite been enough, had it?

But right then, my thoughts went into an abstract, formless territory. I remember being certain that time was not linear and I was simply glimpsing something that was happening, had happened, would always be happening regardless of “where” in the vast expanse of the “when” that my material little brain was trying to identify itself in. It wouldn’t truly matter if I died. Every action in our deterministic universe was already decided - everything from the moment of creation until the day of its cessation. There was no grand scheme for me, I knew, and I smiled to myself as I lay there bleeding out on the sidewalk. The birds would continue singing just as they did above me now, unaware of what was going on below the comforts of their tiny little tree-nests. I had no larger part to play, my past did not matter, and there was no larger meaning that could be conceived by such as I. Some of the existential dread that our minds tries to impose on us (for the simple purpose of ensuring reproduction) fell away right then and there because I knew the body no longer mattered. It would soon cease to be, and my mind along with it. That’s how it works, right? Materialism, and all that. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it didn’t matter. There was no point of deluding myself with trivial earthly matters anymore. Why would it? All my fears and trepidations, gone from consideration in an instant. It calmed me. Gently, the notion rocked me, the swaying motions like the soft rise and fall of waves in a boundless ocean of water enveloping me from all directions like a cold blanket as I started to sink down. And I wanted to sink down. To feel the pressure of the all-surrounding mass holding me in place, a firm grasp to replace all other wistful yearnings of a warm embrace that I might once have longed for, craved for - no longer a prerequisite for a fulfilling existence.

And that is when I saw it. Not with my eyes, mind you, since they were long out of use - but with some far subtler, finely attuned sensory organ meant for percieving very different things entirely. I had been sinking through the dark, cold waters all this time and the impact I could feel now must have meant I had reached the bottom. In place of my earlier contentment I was suddenly struck with an all-encompassing dread as an inconceivable darkness seemed to leap from my chest and expand all around me. In the midst of this new darkness approached a tall, looming figure in the shape of a man. It was a figure I had never seen before, and the image of the being is something I struggle to remember fully as the memory seems fuzzy around the edges, blurred somehow.

He (if indeed it was a he) had a face as pale as death, unnaturally elongated, and looking straight at it was difficult. He appeared to be completely bald, clad in some dark fabric from head to toe like a formless black robe, and held a cane or staff with intricate features and patterns in a delicate but firm grip before him. The man did not speak, but bore a sinister smile on his face that seemed broader that it actually was which along with his pinpoint-like glowing eyes produced a glare that burrowed itself into my very being.

But most disturbing of all was the floating hand-shaped appendages that seemed to surround his form like a giant halo. The terror that encompassed me was of a maddening intensity that I have never felt before and pray that I will never have to feel ever again. I don’t think my sanity would remain the same if I did. The man did not move, but the hands did. They reached for my paralyzed form, slowly as I screamed, screamed with lungs that could not draw breath.

All of this must have happened in less than five seconds but seemed to float through my mind for a thousand years, drifting in and out of my mind until they eventually stopped all together.

And then.

Then.

…… 

…

.

The oscillating drone of distant sirens, a lurching of my own form, something squeezing my upper arm, vibrations beneath me, a soft object over my face and the faint current of air onto my mouth and nose. Several sharp pricks on my arms, one on each of my hands, the pain of my wound gradually decreasing and a soft calm replaced any anxiety I might have felt. A dozen voices around me speaking in words I understood but could not process. The clinking of metal appliances. Imperatives and confirmations tossed back and forth.

And that was the last thing I remember before the nurse or anesthesiologist supposedly injected me with whatever they use to sedate people during an urgent surgery. As I sit here writing this, perched on the hospital bed with a fresh bandage around my waist and an intravenous bag of electrolyte fluid connected by a tube into my arm, I’m struggling to make sense of the whole event. My mind keeps going back to that shift in reality and the sight of that dreadful horror of a figure. I don’t know if what I saw was anything more than a dying man’s mind trying desperately to convey the terror of a subsiding existence, but I can say for sure that none of this will ever truly leave me. Even now I can’t quite bring myself to turn off the lights, for fear of seeing that impenetrable darkness again and the outline of a pale hand reaching for me.

\------

_Subject 9: Near death-experience:_

A 35-year old man was stabbed in the abdomen upon walking home from a bar late at night. Reportedly lost consciousness due to blood loss, in which he describes seeing the Figure on the bottom of a dark sea. No adverse behaviors yet observed. Continue to monitor as directed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!♥ Kudos are always appreciated :)


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